On paper, on air, on screen: 'Teledidactics' and education at the margins, 1920-1950

In this paper, I examine the provenance of distance education or 'teledidactics' in Australia. I take as my case studies the New South Wales Correspondence School and the School of the Air and suggest that their emergence was underpinned by a desire on the part of educational and broadcasting bureaucrats to increase the equity of school provision by addressing the problem of educating remote populations. I argue that this problem was ultimately solved by drawing on elements of the medial ecology (as theorized by Friedrich Kittler) that emerged circa 1900 and that the machines associated with this ecology underpinned the realisation of educating such populations.